Health Costs Rising Faster Under Obama than Bush

Health care premiums are rising faster under President Obama than during President Bush, despite pledges from Obama to bring down health care costs, ABC has reported.

Spending on health care surged 4.6 percent in 2011 – up $4,500 per person, on average – according to the nonpartisan Health Care Cost Institute. That’s up from a 3.8 growth rate in 2010.

Health insurance premiums for individuals and families also climbed year-over-year, up 3 percent ($186) on average for an individual and 4 percent ($672) on average for a family, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.

During Obama’s term, between 2009 to 2012, premiums have climbed $2,370 for the average family with an employer-provided plan – a rate faster than the during the previous four years under President George W. Bush, according to Kaiser.

ABC notes that during his 2008 Presidential campaign, Obama pledged to reduce a family’s healthcare premiums by $2,500 per year.

“We won’t do all this twenty years from now, or ten years from now,” he said. “We’ll do it by the end of my first term as President of the United States.”

ABC observes, “Many of those cost-savings have yet to be realized.”

A few months after Obamacare was passed through a Democratically controlled Congress in 2010, the President sought to tamp down expectations:

“I said at the time, it wasn’t going to happen tomorrow, it wasn’t going to happen next year. It took us decades to get into a position where our health care costs were going up 6, 7, 10 percent a year. And so our goal is to slowly bring down those costs,” he said.

In 2011, Obama’s deputy chief of staff pointed to reforms being implemented now that will save “the average family … around $2,000” by 2019.

The administration also points to hypothetical, projected savings that families are receiving now to demonstrate the effectiveness of Obamacare’s reforms: “Families are already enjoying savings through curtailed insurance premium growth under the law—compared to what premiums would be without it—officials say,” ABC writes.

The administration did not cite any statistics to prove their argument that families “are already enjoying savings.”